Secret History

I just finished reading Palestine The Reality: The Inside Story of the Balfour Declaration 1917-1938, by J.M.N. Jeffries, a British journalist for The Daily Mail at the time of the events discussed. Who would think that a 748-page book on the diplomatic history of the Balfour Declaration and its aftermath could be a page-turner, but this book definitely is. It's a truly remarkable achievement and a fascinating read in many ways. First a bit of back story.

The book was published originally in Great Britain in 1940. It appears it was largely ignored, with very few reviews. But then what really sent it to oblivion was the German blitz, in which the warehouse holding almost all the copies of the book was destroyed. Recently Michel Moushabeck, a Palestinian man who runs Interlink Publishing (and a neighbor of mine, a musician, and fellow activist, here in Western Massachusetts), was told about a copy of the book held by the British Museum and, after reading it there, decided it needed to be reissued. It came out in time for the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, and the world of Palestine scholarship and activism owes a great debt of gratitude to Interlink Publishing for bringing this extraordinary work to light.

The new movie The Post tells the story of the Pentagon Papers from a curious perspective that ignores much of the drama of the real history.

Imagine a film about a backer of an American war in the Third World who, as a State Department official, decides to visit and observe that war firsthand. After many months he learns that most of what our leaders have been telling the public about the war was wrong. In reality, our side was not winning, and most of the claims made for the effort were false. For example, patrols reported to protect certain areas did not even exist. The written reports describing these patrols were simply made up. Therefore both American troops, and the foreign natives we were allied with, were dying by the thousands for fraudulent reasons.

When he returns from his tour abroad, the official learns about a secret Defense Department study. It exposes much of what he had observed. The study is being supervised by his old boss, who gives him access to it. He then meets with a politician who is against the war and they begin to share certain ideas about opposing it. That politician decides to run for president in order to end the war. But he is assassinated while on the verge of winning his party's nomination. As a result, a new president takes office, yet he is not that interested in ending what has now become a continuing disaster. In fact, the new president actually expands combat operations into two neighboring countries.

Nearly 1,000 pregnant women were given radioactive iron by their doctors without their knowledge, as part of a series of experiments for the US military during the Cold War.

Between the years of 1945 and 1947, researchers at Vanderbilt University conducted a twisted experiment in which hundreds of pregnant women were exposed to radiation intentionally for the purpose of testing how it affected both the child and mother.

The study was funded by the U.S. Public Health Service and overseen by the Tennessee State Department of Health. All of these women were poor and had no knowledge of the experiment, and were never informed that they were a part of a study.

A pair of ancient Egyptian mummies, known for more than a century as the Two Brothers, were actually half brothers, a new study of their DNA finds.

These two, high-ranking men shared a mother, but had different fathers, say archaeogeneticist Konstantina Drosou of the University of Manchester in England and her colleagues. That muted family tie came to light thanks to the successful retrieval of two types of DNA from the mummies' teeth, the scientists report in the February Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. The finding highlights the importance ancient Egyptians placed on maternal lines of descent, Drosou's group contends.

Questions have swirled about the biological backgrounds of the mummified men ever since they were found together in a tomb near the village of Rifeh in 1907. The tomb dates to ancient Egypt's 12th Dynasty, between 1985 B.C. and 1773 B.C. Coffin inscriptions mention a female, Khnum-Aa, as the mother of both men. And both mummies are described as sons of an unnamed local governor. It has always been unclear if those inscriptions refer to the same man, but discoverers decided the mummies were full brothers, because the two were buried next to each other and had the same mother.

Idi Amin has gone down as one of the most brutal dictators in history. His eight-year stranglehold in Uganda saw parliament dissolved, elections ended, vicious secret police agencies created, and courts and media alike made totally subservient to his will. In the process, perhaps 500,000 were killed, and hundreds of thousands more displaced.

Idi Amin's story is fairly well known - he seized power through a military coup, overthrowing elected President Milton Obote, in 1971. Less well known is the UK's strong financial, political and military support for Amin and his government, during the earliest years of his rule.

Nonetheless, newly published British government files shine fresh light on this ignored and suppressed period in modern UK political history.

A historian determined to blow the lid on the UK government's shady international dealings is releasing hundreds of declassified documents on an online database. "The British public has little idea what has been done," he told RT.

Mark Curtis has recently created his own online database, aptly named 'Declassified' - a veritable A-Z of all secret dealings between Britain and virtually every country in the world. The comprehensive list of documents, sourced mostly from the UK's National Archives, aims to provide a "snapshot only of the true history of British foreign policy since 1945" - think everything from Nazis to nuclear warfare.

In an interview with RT, Curtis said he decided to compile the documents online as the "British public has little idea what has been done, and is being done, in their names."

The Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht has revealed that ancient human remains, which were discovered by a local hillwalker on a Mayo mountainside in 2016, date back as early as 3,600 BC.

The research found that the natural boulder chamber in which the remains were found was used for human burial practice through the Neolithic period.

A least 10 individuals - adults, teenagers and children - were placed in the chamber over a period of up to 1,200 years, according to the research. One of the adult bones dated to 3,600 BC, while a bone of a child skeleton dated to 2,400 BC.

Newly discovered fossils show that moths and butterflies have been on the planet for at least 200 million years.

Scientists found fossilised butterfly scales the size of a speck of dust inside ancient rock from Germany. The find pushes back the date for the origins of the Lepidoptera, one of the most prized and studied insect groups.

Researchers say they can learn more about the conservation of butterflies and moths by studying their early evolution.

They used acid to dissolve ancient rocks, leaving behind small fragments, including "perfectly preserved" scales that covered the wings of early moths and butterflies.

Archaeologists excavating an ancient pyramid-like structure on the Greek island of Keros have found evidence that its creators were far more sophisticated than previously thought.

The builders of the settlement of Dhaskalio carved the headland into stepped terraces, and added approximately 1,000 tons of white stone to make it look like a giant, gleaming, stepped pyramid. The stone was transported from 10 kilometers away.

New research on the 4,000-year-old site has revealed a range of impressive features, including a complex series of drainage tunnels, and metalwork that was "unusually sophisticated" for the time.

"In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations."

- Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

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